Flight Sim Labs A320-X

Flight Sim Labs A320-X

Flight Planning & MCDU

After installing a beautiful aircraft the first thing I normally do is admire it and this one is no exception, wonderfully textured with a true simulator immersive experience - very immersive, almost like you are in the seat of a A320X However, This is not a review so I will forgo any opinions on the Flight Sim Labs A320-X until a later date.

A great resource for learning the MCDU can be found here at MCDU Emulator

If you are like me and have been struggling with getting a flight plan into the A320-X (lacking this documentation from FSLABS), you are pretty much left to the forums and trying to figure it out for your self. - FSLabs does have a nice tutorial that walks you through a flight - but like I said it does not cover loading your own Flight Plan yourself. So, here we are.

After a couple of visits to the FSLabs forum I discovered the aircraft has a very neat feature that can automate the loading of a Flight Plan, and once you learn how it works , it is quick easy and free to do!. In my quest to figure this out I eventually bought Aerosoft's Flight Plannere X in hopes the program would generate a Flight Plan that the FSLabs could read, well not so easy nor is the process covered in documentation. Here is what you need to know.

The Free Method: Get your accounts on VATSIM and SimBrief (both are free) if you want totally free flight plans use the two I just mentioned. Log into SimBrief and generate your flight plan, during this process you will have a "FlightNumber", jot it down. Now, send the flight plan to VatSim. You have about 2 hours to use the Flight Plan from VatSim before they remove it automatically.

Once you are in the A320-X with the MCDU ready, enter the to and from Airport locations then enter your generated Flight Number, at this point you can press the init request (should be in brown text), about 10 seconds later you should see a message at the bottom indicating a AOC Uplink status. Your Flight Plan is ready for further edits.

Speaking of using the Professional Flight Planner? Payware: PFPX has a "send to" feature, once your flight plan is created and released in PFPX, you can send it to VATSIM using the send to - VATSIM feature. Then like before allows you to import that flight plan into your Airbus by entering the to and from airports in the MDCU with the appropriate "Flight Number" you gave it in PPFX.

The second method using PPFX involves "printing" the Flight Plan to the virtual folders created by A320-X for that purpose. No documentation yet and hit or miss.

Requirements: Your Air Bus 320X is running in FSX environment, and you allowed network access by AOC when you installed it. Do you remember seeing that question? If not, fire up the windows Firewall or your installed firewall and make an exception, also add an exception to the folder path, in my case: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\FSLabs\AOCService

Note: when you start running A320-X it executes the AOCService - this is key for auto loading flight plans. If you trust FSLabs, you can right click the AOCService.exe -> Compatibility-> check off "run as administrator".

When FSX is running and A320-X operational in the FSX environment two virtual folders will be created in this directory path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX\FSLabs\AOCService\Uplink\ (if you did a default install) These directories are created and deleted on the fly and should look like this:

During your loading of the A320-x in FSX the FSL_A32XX.dll - kicks off the configurations and start of the AOC service., if your AOC is not running or you do not see the two directories above, then you may have un-intentionally denied the DLL to run after first install.

In PFPX following the release of your flight plan you will see a "print flight plan" option, if you click it, you should see in the available list of printers: FlightSimLabs AOC Uplink 127.0.0.1 -8080-300-NAV1610001 (or words to that effect).

If you print your OFP to that "printer" it should be available to your airbus 320X ; Everything needs to be running at the same time. When in the Airbus enter the to and from airport information in the MCDU and the exact same flight number from PFPX, and hit init request and your flight plan should load.

Following that you will need to address at least two discontinuity starting airport and arrival airport.